Slicing away that flab...

Whew! A second full day of work is definitely starting to take its toll on my energy level! But, I did manage to get a lot of work done! This piece of alder wood is really starting to look like a guitar more and more. I can hardly stand it! Here's what I accomplished today:

Since this was my first time using a router bit with a bearing on it, I decided to try it out on a piece of scrap wood. The new blades cut it beautifully along the line!

I then set to work routing the body along the template (please excuse the faulty autofocus).

 I was only able to route the body down about three quarters of the way due to the fact that the plunge router can only plunge up so far through the router table. So, I was left with a body 3/4 the way cut. I switched out to a laminate trimmer bit to finish off the rest of the body (shown in photo).

The laminate trimmer finished off the body quite well, so I gave it a rough sand to even things out a bit.

The volume and tone controls need somewhere to live, so the cavity in the back needed to be routed. As I discovered with the pickup cavity, routing the entire cavity out is no fun, so I used a drill press with a forstner bit to remove most of the material. That left a very small amount of work to be done by the router.

The main cavity was cut using the straight bearing bit, and then the offset indent was done with a regular straight bit with a template guide. The offset will make it so that the control cavity cover will be flush with the body.

Eager to have the guitar ready for the neck attachment, I drill pressed the neck slot about an 1/8 of an inch higher than it needs to be, all ready for routing tomorrow! I'm pretty pleased with where I ended up with the body today. It is already down to five and a half pounds, which is almost as light as a Fender Stratocaster, and I still have more material to take off!